by J. R. Rain
“Jesus, Sam. You’re gonna turn me on.”
But I wasn’t listening to him. I was doing all I could to not dive headfirst into the greasy to-go box. Still, I waited. After all, it had only been a few seconds since that first bite. I forced myself to set aside the fork...and waited.
“What are you doing?” asked Kingsley.
“I’m waiting.”
He nodded, getting it. “Oh, right. Barf city. Fingers crossed.”
“Fingers and toes.”
A minute went by. And then another.
“We in the clear?” asked Kingsley. “Should I run for the exit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any pain?”
“No pain,” I said.
“Feel like vomiting?”
“Only when I see your face.”
He reached for the to-go box. “Take that back, or I’m taking back the food.”
“You want another fork in your hand?”
“Sam...”
“Fine. Your face doesn’t make me want to vomit. there’s a small chance that you are still kind of cute. A very small chance.”
“Better,” he said, and retracted his hand. “I think.”
A minute later, while Kingsley feasted on a boxful of riblets, I ate my second bite of gnocchi...and loved every chew. It didn’t take me long to finish that box...and I was already hungry for more.
* * *
That had been three days ago, and I have been eating heartily ever since. Eating anything and everything. Thank the good Lord, I wasn’t gaining any weight. At least, not yet.
Now, a week after canvassing the area—often with a full stomach—I finally hit pay dirt.
Pay dirt in this case was the sound of a car pulling up outside of Knighthorse’s office. I pushed aside the Cinnabon I had been devouring and closed my eyes, casting my mind out, and saw her emerge from a blue compact car. Dark hair, big glasses. It was her, minus the wig. She had dyed her hair.
I licked my sticky fingers clean and shot Detective Sharp a quick text: She’s here.
Detective Sharp knew where I was, of course, although he hadn’t been too keen on the plan. Next, still using the iPhone, I swiped over to the audio app and pressed “record.”
Oh, the wonders of technology.
Chapter Forty-two
I waited patiently behind the desk.
A moment later, the door opened and a woman stepped inside. It was Lucy Gleason, and I was excited, although I didn’t show it.
“Samantha Moon?” she asked.
“You got her,” I said cheerfully.
“May I come in?”
“You may.”
She did so, closing the door behind her. A small woman, even smaller than myself. She was cute, too, until you remembered she had hid out in a women’s bathroom for five days.
She looked at me from just inside the door. I sat behind Knighthorse’s leather-tooled desk. It didn’t fit the ambiance of the bullet-riddled room, which was covered in pictures of Knighthorse himself, depicting him back in his college football days.
Lucy had big, round, baleful eyes, complete with half-moon shaped dark bags hanging underneath. “I assume you know who I am,” she said.
“Have a seat, Lucy.”
She did, picking the middle of three client chairs. I wondered when and if Knighthorse ever had three clients in here at one time. Ever the optimist, I suspected he would say.
“You did it,” she said.
“I did.”
“You flushed me out.”
“I can see that.”
“I had to come see you just so you would leave my family and friends alone.”
“How many knew of your disappearance?”
“Only one, my sister...and one friend.”
“Who drove the red SUV?”
“My sister.”
“Whose red SUV is it?”
“Her co-worker’s. She borrowed it for the day. Told them she was picking something up.”
“Boy, did she.”
“Yes,” said Lucy.
Dammit, I liked her. She had a calmness to her that I admired. A tranquility that I not only craved, but seemed elusive. At least to me. But she had it, except I doubted that she’d always had it.
She has it now, I thought. Now that she is free.
“Why did you do it?” I asked. “Why Starbucks? Why at that moment and time?”
She looked over at my cell phone, which wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding itself behind the lamp. “I assume you’re recording this.”
“You assume correctly.”
She nodded. I was tempted to dip into her thoughts, but her aura was bright blue, which was the color I associated with honesty. Green would have been a different story. So, I waited, knowing I was going to at least hear some semblance of truth.
“I’ve wanted leave Henry for some time.”
“Most people do just that...leave,” I said. “Most don’t hide in a Starbucks’s bathroom.”
“I chose the location very carefully,” she said.
“Not a coffee fan?”
“You would think, but no. This Starbucks is unique in that it only has one main opening, no drive-thru, nor any open windows.”
I said, “And this was important to you, why?”
She shook her head. “You tell me, Samantha Moon. You’ve already figured out so much. Obviously, you sat through five days of tape.”
“Mostly on fast forward,” I said.
“And yet, you spotted me leaving.”
“I have good eyes.”
“Remarkable eyes,” she added.
“Don’t try to butter me up, missy. You’re still in hot water. And why do I suddenly sound like Dick Tracy?”
She laughed lightly at that. A high, refined laugh.
I laughed, too, not so high, and not so refined, and had I known her a little better, I might have thrown in a snort.
When we were done laughing, I considered her reasons for disappearing in this particular setting. I could cheat, of course, and dip into her mind. Except I didn’t feel like cheating. I did the next best thing: I puzzled it out aloud.
“For some reason, you chose a location with only one entrance and one rear exit. A location with no other obvious security cameras, except the one perched high in the parking lot.”
“Keep going.”
“Most important, you must have somehow come across the vent under the bathroom sink. Maybe you dropped your eyeliner—or a paper towel. You looked down and saw the vent partially open. You pulled it all the way open, and saw that, wonder of wonders, you could fit inside. At that point, you checked yourself in for some serious therapy.”
“Very funny, Ms. Moon. Continue.”
“Continuing. Now that you found a possible location to stage your disappearance, you would have come back and staked out the parking lot, perhaps under disguise and out of sight of the camera. Inside, you already noticed there were no cameras, which is what you would have wanted. You didn’t want to be recorded entering the premises.”
“Keep going, Ms. Moon. You’re doing wonderfully.”
I tapped my fingernails on the desk. Until I remembered that my nails looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie. I retracted my hands. Ever the freak. I said, “You wanted the exterior camera to document your disappearance. To prove you went in.”
“Very good.”
I bit my lip, thinking hard. “But you wanted to create the illusion of truly disappearing, which is why you waited five long days, thinking that was surely long enough for any normal person to quit watching the video feeds...and to give up looking for you.”
“Or so I thought,” said Lucy. “Which implies that you, my good lady, may not be normal.”
“You have no idea,” I said, and left it at that. “Moving on. Your disappearance, then, was well documented. Your reappearance, not so much. And it took some luck on my part to even notice you. Admittedly, at that point, I was close to giving up look
ing.”
“Your perseverance is admirable,” she said.
“Again, quit trying to get on my good side.”
“I’m only stating the facts, Ms. Moon. Continue, if you will. This is fun.”
“Your disappearance baffled everyone, including the police and the public at large. The police opened up a missing person’s case, although not a homicide case, because no body was found, and no one, really, had any clue what happened to you.”
“Keep going, Sam. You’re close.”
I felt it, too. This time, I tapped my nails on the desk’s drawer, near my leg, and out of sight of her eyes. “There were no suspects because no crime appeared to have been committed. Even your husband—and husbands are usually the first suspects—wasn’t really considered a suspect. At least, not after the initial questioning and viewing of the tape. Once your disappearance had been established, your husband was no longer deemed a suspect.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, that’s all I’ve got.”
“You circled it, Samantha. You got so close. I’ll fill in the blanks.” She sat forward, collected herself. “I love my husband. But I’m not in love with him. My husband is also abusive.”
“Physically?”
“Sometimes. But mostly, verbally and psychologically.”
“Hold on,” I said, and now I did scan her thoughts, her memories. There he was, yelling at her. There he was, holding her against a wall by the throat. There he was, threatening her. There he was, weeping over his poor judgment and begging her to take him back.
“Did he ever hurt you?” I asked.
“Not really; he just scared me.”
“I think I understand now,” I said.
“Enlighten me,” she said, sitting back.
“You wanted out, but you wanted to punish him, too.”
“Very good, Sam.”
“You wanted him to always wonder what happened to you, to perhaps never find a moment’s rest again.”
“Very, very good, Sam.”
“And in the process, you could start a new life somewhere. Start over. I take it you had no kids.”
“None, and not a lot of family either.”
“Just your sister,” I said. “Who knew about the plot.”
“Yes, the plot. I like that.”
“And had you just walked away, hopped on a plane somewhere and started over...”
“My husband, more than likely, would have been arrested for murdering me. There were enough phone calls to the police to warrant that.”
“You could have just divorced him.”
“He threatened to come after me, to never let me go. To make my life a living hell.”
“But you loved him.”
“Enough to not want to see him rot in jail.”
“But not enough to not traumatize him.”
“I lived with similar trauma for many years. He was due. He loves me. I know that. But he is not a good man.”
I looked at her and suddenly appreciated the depth of her cunning. “So, you disappeared in such a way—a documented way—that your husband wouldn’t be a suspect. A true disappearance.”
“Yes.”
“And he would always wonder, perhaps until the day he died, what happened to you.”
A long, slow smile spread over her face. “Yes, Sam. Oh, yes.”
“And you would be free to start over.”
“That was the plan.”
“All while your husband suffered and drove himself mad.”
“It would serve him right.”
I drummed my fingers on the edge of drawer. “You are a devious woman, Lucy Gleason.”
“I’ve had many years to cook up my escape, Ms. Moon.”
“I assume you have fake passports, fake identities.”
“You name it,” she said, “and I have it.”
“So, you can truly start over somewhere.”
“Yes, at least, that was the dream.”
“There is, of course, the small matter of the dead homicide investigator,” I said. “Detective Renaldo.”
“Yes, I heard, from my sister, that he had passed. You think I had anything to do with that?”
I scanned her thoughts, scanned them deeply and completely, and saw that she hadn’t. Saw, in fact, that she would never commit such a heinous act. I felt her horror at just the thought of it. His death had been a true hit and run. Maybe I would throw in a freebie for the Corona Police Department and run down Renaldo’s killer. Maybe, we’ll see.
“No,” I said, finally. “I don’t think that at all.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“We don’t do anything,” I said. “You, on the other hand, would do well to disappear. I hear Borneo is nice this time of year.”
“Your tape...”
“Will be erased.”
“Would you mind if I watched you erase it? Sorry, but I’ve been on the run for a few weeks now, and I’m a little, ah, paranoid.”
“No problemo,” I said, busting out my Spanish. I showed her my phone, and then had her watch as I erased the latest audio recording, her audio recording.
“Thank you, Samantha Moon,” she said. She reached over the desk and shook my hand, flinching only slightly at my ice-cold touch. Then she nodded, thanked me again, and left.
I watched her leave, and then waited for Detective Sharp to come all the way over from Corona, before I gave him the bad news that it had been a case of mistaken identity.
Oh, and there was also the matter of wiping his memory clean of me finding her on the tape...and anyone else in his department he might have told.
I smiled at that...
And so did the demon inside me.
Chapter Forty-three
“Are you alone?” I asked.
I was sitting with my back against a brick wall. I held my phone loosely against my ear. I had to, because I was dripping sweat. I had gone for a long jog, and had done a lot of hard thinking while I ran.
My jog had led me to here, many miles from my home.
“I’ve been alone for a long time now, Sam,” said the deep voice on the other end. A voice that was deeper than most men, which made sense, since his lung capacity was much bigger, too. Much bigger by a lot.
“You mean from the parade of young, nubile women coming and going in and out of your house at all hours of the night and day?”
“Jesus, Sam. It was never like that. Well, maybe for a few years, but never like what you just described.”
“A full decade is more than a few years.”
“Not when you’re something like me,” said Kingsley, who always hated talking about who we really were on the phone.
“And me,” I said.
“Two freaks,” he said.
“That’s my line,” I said, and watched a moth flutter around the outdoor light. Now, two moths. They looked a tad confused. I wondered if they thought they were circling the sun.
“I miss you, Sam,” he said, and I heard his voice break. “I’ve missed you ever since my stupid mistake.”
“Stupid, stupid mistake,” I said.
“I’ve missed you every day, of every hour, and I have been empty ever since.”
“You’ve dated...”
“I’ve tried to date. Nothing’s worked out. Truth was, I didn’t want anything to work out. I wanted you back. I want you back now.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my girl, Samantha Moon.”
“Am I now?”
“Yes. I felt it from the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“The moment you first laid eyes on me, I was a married woman.”
“And I was respectful,” he said. “I waited. And when we did start dating, I knew you weren’t in a good place. I sensed you were skittish, hurt, and not ready for anything too deep or too fast. I kept my distance, and let you find your way to me. And then, you did. And I was so happy.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. We both knew what had happened next.
“So, what do we do now?” I asked.
And for an answer, the front door swung open, and Kingsley stared down at me from high above, his shaggy hair almost covering his face entirely. He was still holding his phone to his ear.
“Stay with me,” he said. “Tonight. One night is all I ask.”
He reached down, and I looked long and hard at his thick paw...then took his hand. He lifted me to my feet effortlessly...and pulled me into his arms. I went willingly enough.
“One night,” I said, lifting my face.
“One night is all I need,” he said, lowering his face to mine, and he kissed me harder than he’d ever kissed me before.
And he kissed me like that all night long...and well into morning.
The End
Samantha Moon returns in:
Moon Dragon
Vampire for Hire #10
Coming soon!
~~~~~
Also available:
Vampire for Hire:
First Eight Short Stories
by J.R. Rain
Yes, get the complete Samantha Moon short story collection here!
Amazon Kindle * Amazon UK * Kobo * Paperback
~~~~~
Samantha Moon:
First Eight Novels, Plus One Novella
by J.R. Rain
Additionally, get all eight “Vampire for Hire” novels here!
Amazon Kindle * Amazon UK * Kobo * Nook
Also available:
Clean Slate
A Jim Knighthorse Novel
by J.R. Rain
(read on for a sample)
Chapter One
I was doing triceps dips against the edge of my desk when there came a knock on my office door.
“While I dipped,” I said to myself, grunting a little, “suddenly, there came a tapping, of someone gently rapping, rapping at my office door.”
I grinned, despite the fabulous burn that flashed through my upper arms. Yes, I amused myself, even while working out. A sign of a true champion, surely.
I could see the outline of a bald head through my pebbled-glass window. The pebbled glass has a way of making anything behind it look like a post-impressionist painting, even a shiny bald head.
